Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Frances Carney Gies, “The Man Who 

Met Tamerlane.” Saudi Aramco World 29 (September/

October 1978): 14–21; Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: 

An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosen-

thal. Edited and abridged by N. J. Dawood (Princeton, 

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Muhsin Mahdi, 

Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History (Chicago: University 

of Chicago Press, 1964).

Ibn Muqla, Abu Ali Muhammad

 

(886–

940)  chief minister of three Abbasids and inventor of 

the proportioned scripts used in Arabic calligraphy

Born in b

aghdad

 at the height of its power and influ-

ence, Ibn Muqla was responsible for inventing or 

implementing a number of administrative reforms. 

These included the regularization of scripts neces-

sary for documentation and for copying historical 

and other cultural tracts and that were later used 

for copying the q

Uran

. Recent research shows that 

these reforms disrupted preexisting systems and 

eliminated the class of professional Quran copyists. 

These findings revise Orientalist views of Arabic 

calligraphy

 as an evolutionary process and as an 

Islamic art form that merely compensated for the 

supposed absence of figural representation.

Ibn Muqla’s writing system, known as al-khatt 

al-mansub, enabled the letters of any given script to 

be in proportion to one another. It required a well 

cut pen (qalam) with a deep slit for holding ink. The 

nib produced a rhombus-shaped dot that became 

the basic unit of a geometric letter design system. 

Writing an alif (the long, vertical Arabic A) required 

a number of dots one on top of the other, resulting 

in the maximum height of any other letter. The alif

acted as control: its total height was the diameter 

of a circle that enclosed all letters of a particular 

script. Accordingly, letters were in proportion to 

one another inasmuch as they were proportional